Sport 12: Autumn 1994

Tired and Emotional

Darkness kept you up at nightthen daylight wouldn’t let you sleep,shining its sun in your eyes. Yetweariness like this might lay down such pathsas lead to the discovery of a wholenew music. It’s been waiting for all

your chatty certainties to shut up, allthose smooth fingers of manner and night,the white and the black keys, the wholerehearsal’s endless orchestra to sleep,so that a single note, where these pathsintersect, might usefully reverberate yet

within us—can you hear it?—and yetwithout us. You have to listen with allyour life. Stick to the footpathsfor the rest of the day, and the following nightit becomes a simple lullaby; you sleepreminded of how you might be whole

despite the evidence, and your wholebody will thank you with pleasant dreams. Yetsome things a good night’s sleep,you find, is bad for, after all:that tune that was there all nightin your dreams has gone, down which paths

you’ll never know, except that they were the pathsof forgetfulness, and it was the wholenumber corresponding, in the depths of night,to the sound you’d heard when you weren’t ready yet,tired and emotional, the day before, allwashed up and longing for sleep,

the sound of your self. And if sleephasn’t sent it packing, down those pathswe spoke of, it will be drowned now by allthe new day’s noises, as the part meets the wholetheme’s needs then dies. And won’t be back. Yetperhaps, such days suggest, if you stay up all night

now and then, and sleep later, the wholemaze of paths that connect your heart to the world might yetbegin to reveal all, in the slow room of a day that follows asleepless night.